Why Python is Important for You

Post by biafra » Sun, Feb 12, 2012, 3:40 AM UTC

overgard wrote: post #136

wging wrote: post #11

As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language power: looking up the power curve, you see '$Language plus a bit of weird stuff that is probably irrelevant.' So I don't trust myself. As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most la…

As a Python user, I'll give my personal reason for using Python over Ruby. Upfront: I think Ruby is absolutely fantastic. It's a very elegant language. In a lot of ways I think it's cleaner than python. I'd love to use it. Except... Every interpreter I've tried is just too slow. I recently ported over a networking library I wrote in python to ruby, and the requests per second (CPU limited in this case, since it was t…

Post by tikhonj » Sun, Feb 12, 2012, 3:45 AM UTC

reactor wrote: post #135

pnathan wrote: post #103

I have a list I wrote up once about Python's problems. Some of these are more exotic than others. Most of them are kludgearoundable. A couple are fixed in Python 3. Some are simply design choices that are exactly different from my mental model of the world, and due to the TOOWTDI Python world, it is frustrating to work with them. Some Things Wrong With Python * Immutable strings[0] * Everything a reference[1] * Envir…

Perfect. But please tell me ONE language which does/fixes all the above + pure merits of Python.

Post by wging » Sun, Feb 12, 2012, 3:49 AM UTC

wging wrote: post #11

As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language power: looking up the power curve, you see '$Language plus a bit of weird stuff that is probably irrelevant.' So I don't trust myself. As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most la…

Post by craigyk » Sun, Feb 12, 2012, 3:58 AM UTC

dcosson wrote: post #80

loxs wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, decorators, although very useful are a big departure away from python's "simplicity" in syntax. I remember having lots of headaches several years ago wile trying to fit it in my brain. Even after I realized it is something as simple as JavaScript's myfun(fun(){}), my brain somehow continued denying to absorb it.

Agreed that they can be tricky initially and hard to debug, but I think they're totally worth it for eliminating repetitive code. And IMO as long as there isn't a bug in the decorator itself, code with decorators can be just as readable (if not more so) to someone else (e.g. decorating your functions with @authenticated instead of if self.user.is_authenticated: # blah, blah blah)

Post by hello_moto » Sun, Feb 12, 2012, 4:03 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #148

hello_moto wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on your taste buds. Mine prefer consistency. Ruby is a alippery slope when it comes to consistency and it requires the whole community to change certain attitudes.

Ruby seems more consistent to me, as it follows the "everything is an object" design principle quite rigorously. Python does not have any consistent design principle like that at its core, as far as I can tell.